Iran Emoji

🇮🇷 the Iran flag emoji is not stored as a picture. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇷, for the country code IR, which phones and Macs draw as a flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters IR instead; the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone.

The flag it shows is the one adopted on 29 July 1980, after the revolution: three horizontal bands of green, white and red with the national emblem in red in the middle. Along the inner edges of the green and red bands the words Allahu Akbar, "God is greatest", are written in white Kufic script, eleven times in each band, 22 in all, a reminder of 22 Bahman in the Iranian calendar, the day in February 1979 when the revolution won. Iranians write the colours as 💚🤍❤️ or 🟩⬜🟥, in bios, usernames and match-day comments.

The emblem is a stylised form of the word Allah, built from four crescents and a sword, and its outline is also read as a tulip 🌷, in Iran the flower of those who died for their country. Unicode has it as a text character: ☫, officially named the Farsi symbol (U+262B). It pastes anywhere as plain text; in HTML write ☫.

Iran flag emoji with the Lion and Sun 🦁☀️

Many people search for the Iran flag emoji with the lion and sun. The Lion and Sun, a lion holding a sword with the sun rising behind its back, was Iran's national emblem for centuries and stood in the middle of the green, white and red flag from the 19th century until the revolution of 1979. Many Iranians abroad, and many opponents of the Islamic Republic, fly it today as their flag.

There is no separate emoji for it. Unicode represents Iran's flag with the two-letter regional-indicator sequence 🇮🇷 (IR); its appearance is platform-dependent. That is why searches like "iran flag emoji change" or "iran flag emoji x" exist: an app that ships its own emoji pictures can show a different design from the one on your phone's keyboard, and the person you send 🇮🇷 to sees the design of their own app. People who want the Lion and Sun in any app write it out instead: 💚🦁☀️❤️, or 🦁☀️🗡️ with the sword.

Rial symbol ﷼, the toman and Persian numbers

﷼ is the rial sign, Unicode U+FDFC, a single character that writes the word ریال (riyal) as one ligature. The Iranian rial has the currency code IRR; Saudi Arabia and Oman now have their own official currency signs, distinct from ﷼. To type it in Microsoft Word, type FDFC and press Alt+X; in HTML it is ﷼; otherwise copy it from this page.

In everyday life Iranians count in toman: one toman is ten rials, so a price tag of 50,000 toman means 500,000 rials, and people often drop the last three zeros in speech as well. The toman has no Unicode sign of its own; it is written as the word تومان. 💱 stands for the exchange shops where the rate against the dollar is watched every day.

Persian writes numbers with its own digits: ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹. They run left to right inside right-to-left text, just like Western digits, so ۱۴۰۵ is 1405, a year in the Iranian solar calendar. Three of them look different from the digits used in Arab countries: ۴ ۵ ۶ in Persian against ٤ ٥ ٦ in Arabic. The Persian decimal separator is ٫ (۲٫۵ is 2.5), the thousands separator ٬ and the percent sign ٪.

Persian letters and punctuation to copy and paste

Persian, Iran's official language, is spoken by around 66 million people in the country by CLDR estimates, out of a population of about 88 million. It is written right to left in the Arabic script, with a 32-letter alphabet; four of its letters write Persian's own sounds: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh, the s in "measure") and گ (g). Persian also writes kaf as ک and ye as ی, which are different characters from the Arabic ك and ي even though they look almost the same in the middle of a word; text typed with the Arabic forms can fail to match in searches.

آ (alef with madda) is the long a at the start of words like آب (water); ء and ئ write the hamza, the glottal stop, in words like مسئله (problem); and ۀ marks the ezafe linking word on a word that ends in a silent h, as in خانۀ من (my house). Persian also relies on an invisible character, the zero-width non-joiner, to keep parts of one word apart without a space, as in می‌روم (I go).

Punctuation points the other way: the comma is ،, the semicolon ؛ and the question mark ؟, and quotations go in guillemets « ». To type Persian, add the Persian keyboard in Windows settings, on a Mac, on an iPhone or in Gboard on Android. For the full alphabet see the Persian collection; Iran's other languages, Azerbaijani (Arabic), Mazanderani, Gilaki, Southern Kurdish, Turkmen, Northern Luri, Baluchi, Arabic and Bakhtiari among them, each have a collection of their own.

Nowruz emoji and Iranian holidays

Nowruz, the Persian new year, begins at the exact moment of the March equinox, 1 Farvardin, around 20 or 21 March, and families gather round the haft-sin, a table of seven things whose names start with the letter س (s). The emoji for it: 🌱 sabzeh, wheat or lentil sprouts; 🧄 sir, garlic; 🍎 sib, the apple; with samanu (wheat pudding), senjed (dried oleaster), somāq (sumac) and serkeh (vinegar), which have no emoji. Beside them go a mirror 🪞, candles 🕯️, a goldfish, represented here by tropical-fish emoji 🐠, painted eggs 🥚, a hyacinth 🪻, coins 🪙 and a book 📖, often the poems of Hafez. نوروز مبارک (Nowruz mobarak) 🌱🐠 is the greeting.

🔥 is Chaharshanbe Suri, the evening before the last Wednesday of the year, when people jump over small bonfires and sing "my yellowness to you, your redness to me", giving the fire their pallor and taking its health. On the thirteenth day of the new year, Sizdah Bedar, everyone goes out for a picnic 🧺, and the sabzeh from the haft-sin is thrown into running water to carry the year's bad luck away.

Shab-e Yalda, the longest night of the year around 20 December, is spent up late with family eating watermelon 🍉, pomegranates and nuts and reading Hafez. There is no pomegranate emoji, so 🍉 and ❤️ do the work. Muslim observances include 🌙🕌 Ramadan, the fasting month, and Eid al-Fitr, the festival at its end; 🤲 is for prayer and 📿 for the tasbih.

Persian food, football and the rest of Iran in emoji

Chelow kabab, saffron rice with grilled kebab, is the national dish: 🍚🍢 with a grilled tomato 🍅, raw onion 🧅 and bread 🫓, from thin lavash to sangak, baked on a bed of hot pebbles. The prized part of the rice is tahdig, the golden crust from the bottom of the pot. 🍲 is khoresh, the stews: ghormeh sabzi is 🌿🍋‍🟩🫘, herbs, dried limes and kidney beans, and kashk-e bademjan is the eggplant 🍆 dip. 🥒🥛 is mast-o-khiar, yoghurt with cucumber, and 🥛 is also doogh, the salty yoghurt drink. Tea 🫖🍵 is served in small glasses all day, often with a sugar cube or saffron rock candy 🍬; 🍨 is bastani, saffron and rosewater ice cream with pistachios. Saffron, pistachios and pomegranates, three things Iran is famous for, have no emoji.

⚽ is Team Melli, the men's national team, and ⚽🇮🇷 fills timelines on match days; the 2–1 win over the United States at the 1998 World Cup is still celebrated. 🤼 is wrestling, the sport that has won Iran the most Olympic medals, and 💪 the zurkhaneh, the "house of strength", where men train with wooden clubs to the beat of a drum. 🏋️ recalls weightlifter Hossein Rezazadeh's two Olympic golds, 🏐 the volleyball team, 🥋 taekwondo. 🏇🐎 is chogan, polo, played in Persia since ancient times; the stone goalposts still stand in Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square. ♟️ is chess, whose "checkmate" comes from Persian shāh māt; 🎲 represents nard (backgammon), an old Persian board game still widely played.

🏛️ is Persepolis, ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid kings, and 🌉 the 33 arches of Isfahan's Si-o-se-pol bridge lit up at night. 🌋🏔️ is Damavand, about 5,600 m, a dormant volcano and Iran's highest peak; ⛷️ is skiing at Dizin and Shemshak north of Tehran. 🏜️🐪 are the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut, where satellites have measured some of the hottest ground on Earth, 🌊 the Caspian Sea in the north and 🏝️ Kish island in the Persian Gulf. 🐈 is the Persian cat, 🐆 the Asiatic cheetah, which now survives only in Iran, and 🌹🐦 the rose and nightingale of Persian poetry, gol o bolbol. 🌲 is the cypress, sarv, an old Persian symbol of life.

🧶 is the Persian carpet, knotted in Tabriz, Kashan, Isfahan, Kerman and Qom. 📜🖋️ stand for poetry and calligraphy: Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, Hafez, Saadi and Rumi, written in the flowing Nastaliq hand. 🪈 is the ney, the reed flute, and 🪘 the tombak and daf drums of Persian music. 🏺 is for the blue pottery and enamel of Isfahan, 💎 for Neyshabur turquoise and 🧿 for the charms against the evil eye, cheshm zakhm, often helped along with burning esfand seeds.